On the latest “You Must Read This” segment of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Michael Chabon recommends The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard, a collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s post-Holmes short stories featuring the titular French dandy.

Recommended.

WHYY’s Fresh Air recently re-ran Terry Gross’s 1995 interview with William Maxwell.

Publishers Weekly notes that Judith Regan and News Corp. have reached an “equitable and confidential settlement. . .with no admission of liability by any party.” What a relief!

In “The Autumn of the Multitaskers” in The Atlantic Monthly, Walter Kirn laments our buzzing era.

My hunch is that when we look back on it someday, at our juggling of electronic lives and the array of subtly different personas that each one encourages (we’re terse when texting, freewheeling on the phone, and in some middle state while e-mailing), the spectacle will appear as quaint and stylized as those scenes in old movies of stiff-backed lady operators, hair in bobby pins, rapidly swapping phone jacks from hole to hole as they connect Chicago to Miami, reporter to city desk, businessman to mistress. Such scenes were, for a time, cinematic shorthand for the frenzy of modern life, but then communications technology changed, and those operators lost their jobs.

To us.

In the current issue of Bookforum, Christine Smallwood reviews Tony D’Souza’s The Konkans.

The novel fills up with lonely hearts for whom life is a waiting room, their eyes trained as through a glass, darkly, on the one thing they believe will give them happiness.

Vladimir Nabokov gave specific instructions that his final and unfinished novel be destroyed. The manuscript has resided in a Swiss bank vault in the years since his death, but Ron Rosenbaum reports at Slate that Dmitri, Nabokov’s son, now 73, nears a decision.

Last year’s reading list includes only those books that I feel fit the site. Adding genre fiction (barring the notable exceptions herein), textbooks and other professional reading, and kids’ books (do not dare to utter the words “children’s literature” in my presence) would push the total to well over one hundred.

Recommended with reservations.

Recommended with reservations.

Not recommended.

After a restful break, I feel sufficiently armored to carry on with things connected.

Recommended.

Recommended with reservations.